Since I’ve gotten a driving wheel, I’ve been trying out all kinds of driving games. Yet I’m still at heart a computer nerd who knows nothing about cars at all and drives an automatic in real life. So when this popped up as a free game on Epic, I immediately picked it up, thinking I might learn a thing or two. As you might expect, no, you can’t learn how to be a mechanic from a video game but it does at least give you some idea of the mechanical components that make up a car and how they all fit together, plus the tools and equipment that are found in a garage. Unfortunately it is also a simulator in another, less pleasant way. After a while playing this becomes repetitive and grindy enough that it feels almost like a real job.

It’s a little hard to understand what you’re meant to do here at first. All the tutorial does is drop you into a fully upgraded garage where you can click on the various items and tools to get a text description of what they’re used for. Once the game proper starts, things are actually simpler. You select jobs to accept from a list and at the beginning, you’ll be given a list of exactly which damaged parts need to be changed. So you put the car on a lifter to access its internals, unmount those, buy new replacement parts and mount them. As you might expect, often you need to remove other parts as well to gain access to the damaged ones. Once done, you return the car to earn some money and XP. Gaining levels is how you unlock garage upgrades as money is used to buy parts and even whole cars of your own. Later jobs might provide only a vague description such a knocking engine and you need to use diagnostic tools to figure out which parts are bad. Or you could just visually inspect the cars to see parts have a rusty look which indicates they’re bad. As you gain levels, you unlock special story jobs that come with a longer text description of who the owners are and what they do. I believe that you can consider yourself to have finished the game once you’re completed all of the story jobs.

I put it like that because I haven’t reached the end of the story jobs and I don’t think I ever will. Doing the story jobs aren’t bad and it’s amusing to read about little stories like the wannabe race car driver who keeps bringing the same car back to the shop. However in between each of them you probably need to do several randomly generated jobs to earn the requisite XP and it gets repetitive quickly. Even if turning a bolt only involves keeping a mouse button pressed here, there are only so many times you can unmount and mount tires before it stops being entertaining. The standard advice to quickly grind through them is to look for easy jobs to do. I like loud car problems because it just means replacing muffler and exhaust parts and gearbox problems are easy too because there aren’t many parts and they’re all in one place. The toughest jobs are engine problems. There are so many parts it’s easy to miss some and some can be accessed from the engine bay but others must be accessed from underneath the car so you have to keep switching back and forth. It’s a real pain.

So is this game actually educational? Well, it does force you to learn about the many mechanical parts, at least the major ones, that make up a car, what they’re called and how they connect to one another. You also learn about the tools to diagnose problems like testing fuel pressure in the engine and how the test path works to check the car’s suspension and brakes. However the game never explains what each part actually does and it doesn’t cover electronics. There’s no need to mess with wiring or even lubrication. You’re often asked to change the engine oil but that’s it. No brake fluid, gearbox oil or greasing the suspension or anything like that. There’s no physics here as parts float in the air if unsupported and the game doesn’t allow you to make mistakes. So if you take a gearbox apart for example, it won’t allow you put the gearbox cover back on unless everything else in it is in order. So this is a highly simplified representation of the mechanicals of a car but that’s actually still a lot more than I knew before playing this.

This game doesn’t have the license to feature real cars obviously so it instead uses faked versions. There’s a decent variety of them to be sure, from classic American muscle cars to small hatchbacks to roadsters and luxury sedans and pickup trucks. This variety helps give you more different things to do as you need to familiarize yourself with different setups. You can actually see for yourself what a rear-mounted engine is like and how big a V8 engine is. Still they’re not different enough to keep things fresh for long. Apart from fixing the cars, you can take the cars to a couple of locations, an abandoned airport and a race track, for a spin. But of course the driving physics are primitive even if they try to take into account the damage on the car. There’s no manual transmission and the game doesn’t support driving wheels.

Apart from taking on jobs for others, you can also buy cars of your own, either to fix and resell or just to collect and keep. You can visit barns and the junkyard to buy old wrecks and scrounge around for parts. Or visit the auction house for some really expensive ones. There’s even some scope to customize them and tune them with higher quality parts. I haven’t really played with that all that much because of one wall imposed by the game. The paint shop is a very late stage upgrade for your garage as it unlocks only at level 30. That’s a lot of random jobs to get there. Without that upgrade, you can’t paint cars which means that you won’t be able to get rid of the rust stains on old cars and replacing body panels on them leaves them in mismatched colors. That totally kills my incentive to fix up old cars, and hence any reason to visit barns and the junkyard. Maybe that’s this game’s version of end-game content but there’s no way I’m patient enough to grind through so many repetitive jobs to get there.

I can’t complain too much as I got this for free and it was certainly worth my while to learn even this little bit about car parts and the tools and facilities employed in a garage to fix them. I can see how this game can be appealing to enthusiasts who want to geek out over cars. It seems that the DLC adds licensed versions of real cars which must be great for fans. But for me playing this one entry in the franchise is enough to satisfy my curiosity and I doubt I’ll ever come back to this series.